Planning for a Hopeful, Healthy, Working Future

What is wrong with me?

Am I too old?  Have I been out of work too long?  It is so sad, because I know that I have wonderful skills and talents that would benefit some lucky employer.  Yet I just received another rejection, after a second interview.  This is getting harder every time.

Am I allowed to cry?  I want to cry.  Yet in response to this rejection, I just applied for another job. 

Except that I don’t think I can do this anymore.  I just feel like, why should I keep setting myself up for rejection?  This is ridiculous.  I’m done with this.

I am going to focus on finding freelance work.  I want to be in the power position, in a position to pick and choose what work I’ll do.  I am so tired of having no control over why someone decides I’m not “good enough” for them.  I’ll do the deciding from now on.

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I wrote the above late last night, after finding out, online at a company’s “careers” page, that I was “no longer under consideration” for a position for which I was interviewed twice.  I thought it was pretty terrible that I had to find out that way: not from the interviewers themselves, but from a cold impersonal page that provided the “status of my application.”

I was upset last night, but I’m over it now.

Over the weekend, though, I had a similarly depressing experience.  I heard someone on TV opining that new college graduates “have no future” because of the current high unemployment rate.  They have no future – what about me?  At least they probably have fifty or sixty years in which to create their futures.  Compared to these young people, I’m the one who’s running out of time to create a future.

I even had a dream last week in which I was actually begging a former employer for work.  “Are you sure you don’t have some filing that needs doing?” I remember saying in my dream to a former co-worker.  It was pathetic; it felt degrading.

You know how we always have hope that eventually, after a long period of struggle and difficulty, we’ll begin to see some light at the end of the tunnel?  I guess we’re nowhere near the end of this chronically high unemployment tunnel, because I don’t know about you, but I’ll be darned if I can see any light.

Ugh.  I can’t stand myself when I start to sound so whiny, so negative.  It’s time for a new way of thinking, a new perspective on ways to address my unemployment.

It’s just that I truly believe that I’m reaching a point where the emotional highs and lows, the endless hoping followed by hopes being dashed, the stress of wondering and waiting, repeated over and over again, are beginning to adversely affect my mental and emotional and possibly physical health.   It may be time to just – stop.  All of it.  And do something else.  I will find a new approach to solving this problem, this lack of work.  Not only is what I’m doing now not working, it isn’t good for me.  I can feel it.

I think I’ll give this until the end of the year, this search for a full-time job.  If it doesn’t happen, then I will take that as a sign that it’s time to refocus, to set myself some new goals for the new year.

After nearly two years of trying, I’ll be satisfied that I’ve given it my best shot.  It’ll definitely be time then to try something different.  I want a job, I want work, but I want to take proper care of myself too.  I’m not going to let something as relatively unimportant, in the grand scheme of things, as job-hunting wear me down and wear me out.

So shifting gears is my new plan for 2012.  I’m going to see if I can make a go of it on my own, as an entrepreneur.  Right now it feels like a good plan, a peaceful plan, for me.